Twitter Introduces Brand Pages

Twitter on Thursday announced a program for Facebook-style brand pages.



The announcement, which was coupled with the introduction of a major redesign, will expand the number of brand pages on the platform. Launch partners for the pages include American Express, Best Buy, Bing, Chevrolet, Coca-Cola, Dell, Disney, General Electric, Hewlitt-Packard, Intel, JetBlue, Kia, McDonald’s, Nike, PepsiCo, Staples, Verizon Wireless, NYSE Euronext, Heineken, Subway and Paramount Pictures, specifically for the release of Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol.

According to a report in Advertising Age, such brand pages will let advertisers customize their headers to make their logo and tagline more prominent. “Brands can also choose to keep a particular tweet at the top of their time line, and that top tweet also auto-expands to reveal an embedded photo or video from Flickr, YouTube or other sources, without requiring the user to take action,” according to the report.

The new design also lets brands separate their @ replies and mentions, according to the report.

Twitter’s embrace of brand pages, which had been rumored since April, comes about a month after Google introduced brand pages for Google+.

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183 Traffic Generation Tips From the Pros

I grabbed 183 traffic generation tips from pros who’ve been good enough to shared their secrets. The following list represents many of the best of these tips, and I’ve included profiles and links to the aforementioned pros who’ve shared their lists online. Of course, some of their lists contained duplicates, so I took those out along with suggestions I thought were not-so-hot.

The list is not in any particular order. You’ll note that a number of the suggestions are SEO tips and so they will generate traffic indirectly through better rankings in search results.

Here’s the world’s largest list of traffic generation tips

In no particular order

First, build your blog on a solid CMS: WordPress, Joomla, Blogger
Host your blog on your own doman
Build a brand
Build an email list
Write a regular newsletter
Submit your blog to these directories http://j.mp/szcuB1
Blog as a team. Create or participate in a carnival or blog tribe. Link, share and comment on each others posts. (From Word Carnivals)
Be among the first to write something insightful about a news worthy topic
Post to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, etc.
Provide real value in your content
Make your content controversial (sometimes)
Give your best content away for free
Optimize your blog for better search engine rankings
Use Tags on your posts
Install a translator plugin
Use smart internal linking
Target long-tail keywords with lower competition in search engines
Write and give away an eBook
Comment on other blogs

Add social media sharing buttons to your blog
Ping search engines and aggregators like Technorati
Update your website design, and get yourself listed in a design article/blog post.
Limit advertising, initially, so that you don’t drive people away
Sign up at BlogEngage.com to connect with other bloggers and get your articles listed
Buy advertising
Run a pay-per-click campaign
Swap ads with another blogger or website
Create and give away a video course
Submit your content to stumble upon, digg, dilicous, pinterest, etc.
Make a round up of all of your archives in a particular category
Create a better user experience on your blog
Use h1, h2, h3 tags in your posts
Jump on the chance to be interviewed in writing, audio, or video
Interview other bloggers in writing, audio, or video
Introduce yourself to other bloggers
Combine all of your RSS feeds using RSSMix.com, or a similar tool, and submit it to an RSS aggregator
Host webinars with other bloggers
Release content at about the same time every day/week
Utilize video and images in your blog posts
Invite guest bloggers
Submit your site to CoolSiteOfTheDay.com
Provide search engines with an up-to-date sitemap
Make youtube videos
Contribute to Wikipedia
Create a hub for your blog at hubpages.com
Start a podcast

Bold, highlight or italicize some of your keywords
Write snappy, short, keyword rich titles
Answer timely relevant questions (keep your finger on the pulse of your niche)
Use Alt Tags for images
Turn your blog posts into PDF docs and share them Scribd, Docstore, and similar sites.
Write list posts
Find and write about
unique
news in your niche (don’t post what everyone else is posting)
Get into guest blogging
Use animoto to create a killer animated slideshow and push it everywhere
Join a forum
Attend conferences for networking opportunities
Handout business cards
Use Odiogo to turn your blog into a podcast automatically
Put out a press release
Put your URL on everything
Make stickers, bumper stickers, etc., post them, and give them away
Speak at relevant events
Focusing on building your Community
Answer questions on YahooAnswers, Quora, etc. (Ad a link to your profile, or mention your site in your answer.)
Use Feedburner
Add your URL to your email signature
Advertise on eBayClassified
Always link to your blog in your online profiles
Use friendly URLs

Join the comluv.com network
Design and sell products on CafePress, Zazzle, and any number of other similar companies
Write an ad for your blog on Craigslist.com
Comment on related videos on YouTube
Take advantage of bumps in traffic by pushing out content fast
Let your analytics data tell you what’s working and duplicate those efforts
Create Squidoo Lenses
Create free pages at About.me, LookUpPage.com, and similar sites
Follow people on twitter
Create a page on 43things.com about your blog and your goals
Submit your site to BlogCatalog.com
Join your local chamber of commerce
Start a meetup
Launch a conference
Use your blog’s name as a username
Buy an ad in your local news paper
Host a blog contest
Engage on facebook pages and mention facebook pages in your own updates
Create a Google+ brand page
Submit articles to EzineArticles
Do keyword research
Utilize bread crumbs and related articles
Come up with a great April Fool’s prank for shot at going viral
Write about other blogs
Link to other bloggers, if you want them to link to you
Comment on another (related) blog
Be yourself, use your own unique voice

Well, I hope you found some useful tips that will help you increase traffic to your blog (or website).

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Why Google Plus Pages (Will) Beat Facebook. And Twitter

Google announced on Monday that it will offer Google+ “Pages” to brands, businesses, and celebrities, so that they can trumpet themselves across the search giant’s fledgling social network.

Much like Facebook Pages, these Google+ destinations are places where commercial names can not only broadcast news and propaganda to the world at large, but also interact with their fans and critics. You can sign up here at the new Google+ business site.

The news comes on the heels of the company’s October announcement that Google+ is now part of Google Apps, the search giant’s online suite of office applications. Clearly, Google is serious about turning its social network into a business tool. But the company is not alone.

At this point, Google+ Pages are where businesses interact with web denizens on the cutting edge of net technology, and Facebook is where you interact with everyone else. Facebook boasts 800 million users, while Google claims 40 million.


Google’s limited audience isn’t necessarily a bad thing. For now, Plus streams generally contain “non-frivolous” information. A company’s message isn’t lost amid a sea of random pictures and cat videos. Of course, this may change.

But more importantly, Google integrates Plus into its web-dominating search engine. With Google+ Direct Connect, searchers can insert a “+” before their query and jump directly to a business’s Google+ page. Type “+YouTube” into a Google search box, for instance, and Google will take you straight to YouTube’s Plus page.

This is where Google will have an advantage over Facebook: With a broad array of services like search and Gmail and Chrome and Android, Google offers tools that are fundamental to the online lives of so many people — and these can be tied to Google+. As Google+ evolves, Google will have the means to promote its social network — and the branded Pages within it — in ways that Facebook or Twitter cannot.

And though many point to the similarities between Plus and Facebook — and the similarities have only grown with the addition of branded pages — the addition of Pages may be more of a challenge to Twitter. While a certain portion of the population is accustomed to information in 140 character bites, Google+ provides a richer forum where companies can release news to the public.

Sharing pictures and video on Twitter, for instance, is still a rather clunky process. Followers usually must click through a shortened link and wait for a new page to load. By contrast, Google+ integrates directly with YouTube, the web’s unquestioned video heavyweight, and Picasa, its photo sharing tool.

What’s more, anyone can readily comment on a Google+ Page post, and the Page owner can readily respond. With Twitter, that sort of communication becomes a tedious series of @-messages that clog the feeds of uninterested followers. Google is certainly trailing the pack with Monday’s announcement, but in other respects, it’s well ahead.

Update: This story has been updated to remove a suggestion that Gmail users may be automatically opted in to Google Plus. This is not the case.

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Top 8 SEO Tips for a Better Google Places Ranking

Is your Google Places page showing up at or close to the apex of restricted enterprise listings in explore results? If you replied no, then retain reading.

Here are my apex eight tips to enhance your Google Places page’s risks of being encountered by restricted searchers:

1. Get Verified

The first step to get your Google Places itemising on Google SERPs is to get it verified. This can be wrapped up through Phone SMS, Phone Call or through mail. Google will convey you a pin computer encrypting which you basically have to move into into your Google Places account.

2. Add keywords to your enterprise delineation, but not too many

Throughout the setup method of the Google Places page you can delineate your enterprise in up to 200 characters. While you should use your most valued keywords in this segment, don’t just stuff keywords in. Write a practical, persuasive delineation that will request to readers and Google.

3. Use the right groups to delineate your business

With the groups you have to play by Google’s statutes a little bit – you want to decide a least one or two groups that truly exist. Start typing and observe what Google puts forward to you, then you will still get the likelihood to devise three groups supported what you truly do.

4. Make the most of the ‘Additional Details’ area

Not only is this a many way to get some more particulars of your enterprise on the piece of paper, it is in addition a many position to penetrate some of those keywords that will position well. Most population just don’t look like to annoyance topping up this in – stay one step in front of the competition!

5. Get table in other online enterprise directories

Listings of your enterprise in directories for instance Local.com, Yellowpages.com, your restricted city’s bedchamber of finance, or a list of directions affiliated with your work can aid enhance your Place page’s ranking.

6. Space out the time when customers’ re-evaluates are posted

Google will reek a rat if your re-evaluates show all at once. This might source Google to force your Place piece of paper down in explore results. So assure your customer’s send their re-evaluates in a firm stream.

7. Don’t disregard to add videos and images

While this isn’t going to be a immense aid to enhance your position, geo-tagged images and videos in actual may give you a bump. You can add up to 10 images and up to five videos for free and these may make your Places piece of paper more appealing to searchers.

8. Monitor your Places piece of paper statistics.

By logging into your Places piece of paper account every so often you will be gave with a type of statistics to aid you better optimize your page. This embraces the apex explore queries that produced users to observe your itemising and how more snaps happened to your website over the past week or month.

These are just a few Google Places page optimization tips you ought chase in rank to get good rankings, perform you have any supplemental tips? If so, we would love you to share them with our readers below.

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Google Plus+ Business Profiles are Here!

After months of waiting enterprise profiles for Google+, Google’s public web, are here. Google has, in its typical limited-access latest approach, made it obtainable, in the first case, to those who have Google Apps for Business (the service charges $5 per month to use and you perform want to have a website) with the stated intent of ironing out the bugs before it gets turned over out to all population other, afterwards in November.

For Google Apps users the service wants to be empowered manually from in the Google Apps account and then it takes a little tinkering to configure entry to and dividing rights. The roll out of the Business Profiles for G+ renders us a first view at what we might look frontwards to by way of functionality.

Complete Control and Privacy Settings

G+ users are now employed to the way they use Circles to segregate who they share content with and how and in addition who sees the content they share. On the Business Profile for G+ the matching, flexible way of dividing and segregating content is in position added to the skills to seamlessly convey in the financial gathering with precise gatherings or sections, share written knowledge and join through the first exchange of information. Essentially this is like having a financial gathering intranet with adjoined functionality obtainable through your Google Apps profile.

Hangouts, the skills of G+ users to rise into an impromptu video short two-way chat draws close in the Business Profile with the picks of dividing video screen shots and collaborating in real-time on a Google Doc. This, over, takes financial gathering communications to a brand-new stage leveraging Google’s constancy to bring ahead a unwavering enterprise result for the tiny enterprises which could not have finance for any kind like this.

Obviously the aspect becomes even more strong when it draws close to connecting with paying clients and conveying to them, with the skills of a tiny sales assembly to give whole multi-media making acquaintance with paying clients on a personalized basis.

Portability of Data

Although Google explicitly requested enterprises to retain off from bringing ahead enterprise profiles on its web until the Business Profiles were geared up the financial gathering recognises somewhat many of population have set up confidential profiles and employed them to share content and market their businesses. For those who have wrapped up this all is not lost. Google is toiling on a migration implement to sanction those users to seaport their written knowledge over to their Business Profile on Google+. This will be obtainable, optimistically, by the time the Business Profiles are turned over out globally so there should be little time lost.

One speedy remark of suggestions, because Business Profiles are created to be controlled centrally, you may like to consider double before porting all your written knowledge (and computer communication messages) through as your midpoint overseer will have entry to to them, embracing the skills to impede which Google services you can entry to and how you can seaport or not written knowledge through services.

Dominant Network for Business

With Google+ Business Profiles Google is striving unbent at the enterprise customer who wants to merge with paying clients and enterprise population in his industry. With the network’s skills to manipulate entry to a Business Profile signifies you no longer have to put up with fluffy kitten photos as part of your once a day G+ regular, neither perform you have to change your short two-way chat off or feign you are not there because some online acquaintance with time to consume with blast desires to discharge the breeze while you are pursuing a deadline.

This may well make Business Profiles on G+ the predominant signifies of B2B bindings, faking –suddenly- a actual danger to LinkedIn whose functionality, in spite of fresh improvements basically not able to compete.

Google had agreed analytics integration in its Business Profiles and the function is now on offer with the pick to path just how your public interactions on the G+ web pay-off added to the skills to observe how far they arrive at as Google’s explore selections up your public postings and brings ahead a worldwide online selling operation out of a quite low-key interaction. The integration of Analytics raises the prospect of taking things to an wholly new stage and socialising Google Ads, which is what a seamlessly brought ahead public financial gathering existence needs. This matches in well with Google’s strategies to add the Google +1 button to its show clearly web ads.

The nuanced advance which Google had agreed is there letting marketers to make a determination just how and when they merge with their online public and evaluate the results. The Google development assembly is toiling hard at a worldwide roll out day of the year, hold back, organise and get geared up to progress in the time Business Profiles become publicly available.

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